Knight Aberrant
Lancelot Lamar, the gone-to-seed scion of a genteel New Orleans family, has committed a terrible crime, and he has been locked up in the Center for Aberrant Behavior. “I’m in the nuthouse,” he tells his visitor, a priest, an old friend, who has had troubles of his own. Lancelot tells his story at great length – a 257-page dramatic monologue that is perhaps Walker Percy’s most disturbing novel. Lancelot was our book group’s novel for February. Yes indeed. It disturbed us.
Lancelot had been locked up in the psychiatric hospital for killing four people, including his wife, an adulterous Texas heiress named Margot Reilly. Three died when he deliberately set fire to his antebellum mansion. He murdered the fourth with a knife shortly before the conflagration when he discovered him in bed with Margot. Lancelot had been jolted out of the aimless, semi-alcoholic malaise that was his life some weeks earlier when he discovered that someone other than he was the father of his daughter. Newly sober, clear-headed, watchful, Lancelot sets out on a quest. Whereas his medieval namesake sought the Holy Grail, twentieth-century Lancelot would search for evil. As he tells his priest friend:
What if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there’s a mystery. People would sit up and take notice. I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me. . . .
The mark of the age is that people are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the “evil” come in?
Lancelot sets out to see if it’s possible to do a purely evil deed. It’s a search for God that’s suitable to our secular, therapeutic, post-Nietzschean culture where “terrible things happen but there is no ‘evil’ involved.” At least that’s the interpretation we decided to put on this story. Walker Percy was a novelist of ideas. He saw his fiction as a diagnostic tool to expose the underpinnings of the modern malaise. “What to do with time?” Lancelot asks his priest friend. “A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion things. But what to do?”
The priest, whom Lancelot nicknames “Percival,” finds his own answer to that question. He has been troubled in his ministry. At the end he decides to pastor a small church in Alabama, where he will “preach the gospel, turn bread into flesh, forgive the sins of Buick dealers, administer communion to suburban housewives.” He listens in silence to Lancelot’s ranting, to his perverted search for pure evil, to his antic confession of crimes. He does not speak until the very last page of the novel. The last word of it is his. Lancelot asks, “I’ve finished. Is there anything you wish to tell me before I leave?” Percival says, “Yes.” What would a Christian say to Lancelot? Percy lets the reader answer that question. It made for an excellent book discussion.